


Wounded in Between

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: M/M, Porn Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-30
Updated: 2008-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:13:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is summer and Sam has no map for this particular journey, wherein he is locked in a car with Toby Ziegler."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wounded in Between

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle VI, to the prompt 'maps'.
> 
> Warnings for: dub con, angry!sex, alcohol, casual violence.
> 
> The text Sam uses is the last stanza of Leonard Cohen's 'The Great Divide'. Any resemblance to passages from the first chapter of 'Bright Exhalation' are entirely due to my own inability to be original.

Toby heaves a sigh towards the window of the car.

"We really aren't _that_ lost, Toby."

"Yeah? Isn't that Alaska I see approaching in the distance?"

"We're somewhere between Illinois and New Jersey, I'm sure of that."

" ... _Good_. So only four hundred miles to go then. In your choice of four directions."

"You were meant to navigate."

"You're the one in control of the car, Sam. You're the one who keeps making left turns in the dark!"

"If I keep going left -- "

"If _you_ keep going left, _we_ keep going round in circles! Which is what we've been doing now, _somewhere_ in the continental United States, for the last two and a half hours!"

Sam sighs. "Yeah. Okay. It's dark now and we're lost. And you obviously don't want any suggestions from me. So what do you want to do?"

"Find a motel and get very drunk. In that order."

"Okay then," Sam says, softly, against the thick air, bitter with Toby's anger, with Toby's desire to be anywhere else. His boss is staring straight ahead into a sky that has only been dark for an hour, even though it is currently half past nine in the evening. It is summer and Sam has no map for this particular journey, wherein he is locked in a car with Toby Ziegler, whose divorce papers finally arrived at the office last week, whose sentences have been padded with invective since they left Chicago, who hasn't so much as loosened his tie in this 90 degree heat. Who is filling up the spaces which grief has made in his heart with savagery and knows he can count on Sam to remain like a rock in the middle of the storm, battered but still standing. And none of that would be so bad, Sam thinks, if it were even a little untrue, if Toby hadn't read his heart perfectly, first time.

He risks a glance sideways. Toby has leant his head against the passenger window. He is not asleep yet - his breathing is too ragged - but he already looks older for having closed his eyes. The failing light picks up the patterns of lines over his face - the vulnerable places, creases beside his eyebrow, smudged under his eyes, the hollow shadowing his cheekbone. Sam sighs again and turns back to the road, trying to put it all out of his head. Motel, bed, sleep: all achievable goals. Not this, never this mess of tangled desires and the ache in his belly, steadily growing stronger.

*

Toby keeps his promise and cleans out the motel's quite minimal supply of liquor, demanding a bottle of Jack Daniels and a single glass before he asks for the room key. Two single beds and a tv set to the local news channel because however much Toby curses at it and slams his open palm down on its hood, it won't pick up CNN. Sam sits in the only chair, off to one side of the beds and gets out his notebook and tries not to think about how tired he is, until his eyes close without him realising it and sleep draws down on him like darkness.

*

He knows it is a dream, because he knows he fell asleep in the chair and now he's in the left-hand bed, in Toby's bed, with his legs open and his face stinging from the scratches of what feels like a hundred desperate kisses taken from him by a man with a short beard and a broken heart. The lights are all off and only the television gives any kind of illumination, the primary colours of the news station having given way to the sharp whites and grey blacks of an old movie. Toby is standing by the bedside table like a shadow, a little denser than those in his surroundings. As Sam turns his head Toby throws his head back - finishing off the last of the whiskey, whose empty bottle he puts back down on the table with a steady, deadly hand. His shirt is loose, unbuttoned; it drifts out over his hips as he turns to face the bed. Sam puts out a hand and rests it against the curve of his belly, warm and hard under a white undershirt, then slips his fingers down, into his right hand pocket, across the length of his zipper, hooking into his belt and pulling --

He remembers the kisses, the furious negotiations over small stretches of flesh which Sam is happy to give up but Toby wants to fight over, the squeezing of fingers not his own around his cock and his own hands being battered away when he tried to return the favour, the careless slap across his cheek which comes , it seems, as an afterthought. It is nothing like his other dreams when Toby enters him, roughly and ungenerous, fucking him in sharp shallow thrusts which always miss his prostate, building up to a bursting rhythm in a matter of seconds and breaking with a cry which lingers in Sam's ear. Toby sleeps; Sam jerks himself off with his eyes tightly shut, concentrating on where his arm and Toby's side touch.

In the morning, when he realises it wasn't a dream - sore and ill-used and counting up the traces of teeth marks on his skin (three on his inside thighs, one beside the arc of his left hipbone, two where his elbow creases into his bicep, one around the circumference of his thumb, one in the centre of his jaw on the left side and a split in his bottom lip), he sits on the side of the bed and watches Toby sleeping. He is sprawled on his front, still under the effect of a whole bottle of Jack, and he won't notice, he won't wake if --

Sam swallows painfully as he rests his palm flat against Toby's back. His skin is warm and there is a slight slick of sweat between his shoulderblades, running down his spine. Sam slides his thumb along the vertebrae, then bends his head down and rests his forehead against the place where the curve of Toby's ribs starts, where he can feel his sleepy breathing, in and out. He fits his palm to this curve and sits and listens for a while: Toby's breathing and the sound of birdsong and the cars on the highway. When he looks up he expects to see a 50s-era motel in black and white, but there's the neon of the vacancy sign and the lurid yellow towels just visible through the open bathroom door. Toby is still fast asleep, moaning very softly. Sam drops a kiss at the nape of his neck, an 'I'll be back in a second' kiss, walks over to his bag and rummages around in it for a minute or two before he finds what he wants.

It's the heat and the low throb in his split lip which makes him do it, he thinks. And wishing for a way to remember the last twenty four hours which isn't entirely dependent on Toby's reading of the events; not beholden to his barrelling wrath and ungentle lust but something sweeter, secret, his. He bends his head to Toby's shoulder again, kisses the skin, sucks it into his mouth, licks off the taste which is not just sweat but the amalgam of pheromones and the smell of hope and hero worship that Sam has had swelling dark unused centres in his brain for months now. And he's always wanted to do this and never had a lover who would let him, or whom it would suit. It will suit Toby.

He tests the tip of the marker on his hand first: wet, full jet black and soft, a little lick of ink. He smiles to himself, a little sadly. Then he begins.

At first it's like graffiti - writing his name on a wall, just _Sam Seaborn_ with a little flourish just where Toby's ribs disappear into the flesh of his back. Then random patterns which don't make any sense and end up dissatisfying him; he rubs them out with a spit-wet finger. He lies still for a while, spooned around Toby's body, with his face close to the back of Toby's neck and his nose in Toby's curls. Eventually he sits back up and writes in small, printed letters just where the indentation of Toby's spine begins to curve and plane out towards his shoulderblades, a short, inappropriate, desperate verse resigned already to defeat:

_ I DON'T KNOW HOW IT'S GOING TO END YOU ALWAYS LEFT THAT OPEN BUT OH YOU ARE THE ONLY FRIEND I NEVER THOUGHT OF KNOWING _

He kisses the words as they move with the rhythms of Toby's breathing. He sits and make similes in his head to catalogue that which he is sure he will never have again. Then he gets up, removes the pen back to his bag, pulls the sheets up as far as Toby's thighs and slips off to the bathroom and stands in the shower, trying to steady the desperate inhalations and exhalations of his own breathing, which feel like they might break open his chest.

Later, both showered and changed and moving around the room careful of hangovers and unfamiliar morning routines, Toby starts:

"Sam?"

"Yeah?"

Toby glances down at his shoes, then up into Sam's face. And his eyes are a little bloodshot and very tender, the way a wound is tender.

"Thank you," glances off his tongue, blurred on his bottom lip.

Sam nods, slowly. "You're welcome."

It's Toby who takes the three steps across the garish carpet and puts his hand on Sam's shoulder and leans forward with a diffident kiss that Sam doesn't try to make into what it cannot be, yet.

Sam smiles at him, Toby turns away with a sudden blush in his cheeks.

"Four hundred miles and home," Sam says to Toby's back, smiling, and not so sadly anymore.


End file.
